


Stargazer and Rebel

by Geneviéve Bartok (BlackRoseHunter)



Category: The Silence Series - D. Nolan Clark
Genre: Alterward AU, Backstory, Bonding, Book Combination, Book Spoilers, Building Stuff, Coming Out, Fan-made Backstory, First Kiss, Fluff, Forbidden Suns, Forgotten Worlds, Forsaken Skies, Late Nights, M/M, Post-War, Stargazing, Tea, mentions of characters, mentions of original characters - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-21 08:10:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11353398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackRoseHunter/pseuds/Genevi%C3%A9ve%20Bartok
Summary: Zhang confronts Valk about his sexuality; Valk tends to ponder things out on rooftops; someone ends up in someone else's bed with no explanation needed.Or...Valk turns out to be gay and ends up cuddling with Paniet all night.





	Stargazer and Rebel

**Author's Note:**

> Hey again. I'm back and adding on to this underrated fandom. As always, thanks goes out to you for reading, and to AMI (reachable at https://www.quotev.com/groups/242818/topic/4183206?page=1 and https://www.quotev.com/roseadagio) for the beautiful cover design as seen below. Also, again no beta has been done yet, so if you're interested in beta-ing my works, don't be shy! (Also, what is the true definition of a beta? I still don't fully understand the workings of this website.)
> 
> Enjoy!

* * *

 “You like him, don’t you?”

Valk spluttered. His forearms scrabbled as he stumbled against the railing he had been leaning against as if both utterly terrified by Zhang’s sudden presence as well as her statement. He righted himself as she approached, returning to his original position. The railing reached well above Zhang’s head; she leaned up against the barring and stared down into the room below. She turned a cocky eye to him, though Valk didn’t return the look. Maybe he did; Zhang couldn’t see through his helmet to tell.

“I’m not gay,” he replied gruffly. He ran a gloved hand over the top of his helmet - the equivalent of a man running his fingers through his hair.

“Sure,” Zhang said. She was beginning to sound like Lanoe. Too much like Lanoe. “I can tell something is up, though.”

Valk hung his head as best he could and sighed deeply. He suddenly felt like he couldn’t breathe.

“Why’s your helmet up? Bad habit?” Zhang teased. Valk’s helmet flowed back into the vents, revealing his tired synthetic face. Zhang seemed almost taken aback by his appearance; she had never seen Valk so defeated or tired, even in his pre-body form. Sure, she had seen his shoulders slump before, but she had never seen the dullness in his eyes quite like this before.

“I guess.”

She and Valk were different, she supposed. For starters, she was a human, whatever body she was in or not, and he was an AI, whatever body he was in or not. Lieutenant Hallister had seen to his most befitting appearance, right down to the tattoo everyone cooed over when they first discovered it. However, she knew what pining after something you may never be able to have felt like. She figured it was a bit like her and Lanoe; maybe she did want to marry him now. Although she couldn’t say for certain if this was something new or faulty or something that Hal had discovered when she was digging through his hardware, or if it were something that he had always been, even before his accident.

“The engineer, huh? Kind of ironic, don’t you think?”

“Don’t remind me…” Valk’s head dropped down onto his arms, accent never diluted. Zhang had always found that attractive about him; he sounded almost Australian if he had lived on Earth when he was young, but like one parent was Australian and one was American. It worked.

Zhang sighed and knocked his shoulder, not without difficulty. “Cheer up, kid. It’ll work.”

“I-” Valk suddenly glared down at her. “That’s crazy,” he said, a bit too loud. Men and women - marines and neddies and squaddies and the likes, that including Paniet himself - glanced up in his direction. Valk shrank down a bit and cowered until the attention faded. He sighed again, rubbing a hand over his face.

His skin was a bit too shiny, almost like Bury’s, though he wasn’t a Hellion. He had grown up with normal skin, but looking closely at his now, though checked with scars and freckles Halli had found from pictures, it didn’t have the definition, the tiny lines and such, that it used to have. It moved and flexed the same way real skin did, but it wasn’t truly real. That being said, when he ran a hand over his face, his skin didn’t bend the way a human’s would have; it seemed too stiff, too rigid, to do so.

“It’s not,” Zhang spoke softly as if she were his mother. Sometimes it felt like she was. “I have hope for you. It is the twenty-fifth century, after all. And that Adlivinian is not too coordinated to his planet’s tastes.”

Valk rolled his eyes, then trained them on the neddy. Despite having been in a coma just two months ago, he was bouncing around and laughing and conversing with everyone like his normal self, even better perhaps than he had been before. His face seemed empty without the monocle of circuitry decorating it, lighting up his face and reading out information Valk could see just as easily. Even without that, though, he was still too good to be true. Zhang was right; based on everyone else he had met from Adlivun, Paniet wasn’t like them at all; too flamboyant, too boisterous, too loud and energetic and friendly and kind and just __Paniet__. Paniet: quite possibly gay, tiny, strong, excited Paniet. He and Valk were opposites, Valk knew, but he supposed that opposites did attract.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot,” Valk glanced down at the redhead. He noticed her hair was simply tied up in a ponytail today.

“Are you actually straight?”

Valk slumped again. His eyes almost glassed over, as if he were about to fall asleep. Then he met her gaze and locked eyes with her. She stared him down until he looked away.

“No.”

“May I ask what you are then?”

“I… Okay, fine, yeah, I’m gay. Is it really that obvious?”

“Well, with the whole Ehta front you put up, no. I can see through that, though.”

Valk shook his head and closed his eyes. He sighed, then opened them again, staring up at the high vaulted ceiling above them. He glanced down at Zhang again, who gazed up in fascination at him. She smiled, turning back to lean against the bars again.

“Can I ask something else?”

“I have no secrets left.” That made Zhang chuckle a bit. Valk did, too.

“How much sleep have you been getting?”

That got a rise out of Valk. He pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head. He seemed to do that a lot. Probably because he had a head to shake.

“Not enough. Probably a couple hours a night. Why?”

“Because you look exhausted. Like you haven’t slept in weeks. Are you alright?”

“Do I look alright to you?” Valk reattached his eyes to a certain neddy down below. “I just came out to you and obviously I’m not getting enough sleep. I just did six hours of heavy lifting and work. I’m not alright.”

“I meant mentally-wise. You seem drained.”

“Well… Yeah.” Valk didn’t take his eyes off of Paniet. He had his back turned, but even there Valk could see him duck under a large beam being carried past him, then chuckle with the person next to him about something. “It’s been getting to me, you know?”

“Him?”

There was a long beat of silence. Zhang almost thought Valk had fallen asleep right then and there.

“Yeah. Him.”

Zhang began to say something else, but Valk cut her off.

“I have dreams about him sometimes. Not like weird dreams or anything. Just about him. Doing random things; appearing out of maintenance hatches covered in grease like he always did; laughing at jokes; even just appearing there, just standing and not saying anything, but being there. I had this weird one once where I was shouting at Lanoe about something, I can’t remember what now, but I was mad, seriously mad. And then I looked past his shoulder and stopped waving my hands around and there he was, standing there without saying a word. He had that look on his face. You know. The one where he looks at you like a child but it’s his own child so he loves you.”

Zhang fell silent. She didn’t know how to interpret dreams or anything like that. She tended to be a bit more realistic than resorting to such things. But obviously Valk could truly be in love with this kid and she did the only thing she could think of: give him the advice she had given him when she had begun to fall in love with Lanoe.

 “Hey, kid,” she prodded him to get his attention. “Just remember this: only force it if you feel like you need to. Force yourself to say something if you think it’s right. But don’t force something on him if you don’t think it is. Just wait. You’ll know when the time is right.”

Valk seemed a bit taken aback. He blinked down at her, then a small smile cracked his tired face. He nodded, breathing deeply, then gazed back down on Paniet, who turned and found Valk and Zhang standing up in the viewing bay. He grinned up with one of his eye crinkling, face flushing smiles and waved. Zhang only smiled back; she knew who he was waving at.

 

⚙    ⚙    ⚙

 

For some odd reason that Valk couldn’t place, he couldn’t help but think to himself that he had the decency - that audacity - to run a bit of razor paper over his face before heading outside. To be alone. He had climbed atop the large roof of the building he had been working in earlier that day, deciding to sit precariously at the edge where he could fall at any second if he wasn’t careful. Something about doing so dug up old memories. Memories of the Establishment. Memories of sitting for long hours up on the roofs of his old bunkers and watching the stars pass by. Memories of being a child, sitting up on the roof of his old house and memorising constellations, promising himself that he would someday join them up there in that sky as a pilot. If only he had known how tainted that sky truly was before he did.

There was a comfortable gravity belonging to the planet he as on, enough that he had weight and could walk normally without floating away but also not enough that his joints would lock or his old phantom limb syndrome would act up even against his artificial will. The planet also had a nice atmosphere; it was cool and breezy, but never enough to make it truly cold. Maybe it was cold at night, but tonight was nice. Tonight was okay. Just simply okay.

A breeze fluttered through Valk’s short hair, brushing over his face and lifting his shirt with its cool grasp. A sudden sound, so soft Valk almost thought he imagined it, caught his attention. A tiny body shuffled over, barefoot and probably a bit cold, and sat down next to him. A cup, mismatched from his companion’s own, was offered to Valk. There was gravity here, Valk realised. That meant he could drink out of a cup instead of a tube or a tab. The cup was warm and steamed a bit, but it was bearable and calming on his aching nerves. It warmed his hands and inhaling the subtle scent of tea leaves almost made him fall asleep. He had been out there for a few hours, just lost in thought. He wondered what time it was.

“Hi, love,” a tiny voice, high pitched and drowsy, said. Barely a whisper compared to the giant city. The giant planet. The universe itself, stretching out before them.

“Hey…” Valk turned to greet Paniet, though stopped short when he caught sight of what Paniet was wearing. A white crop top, probably meant for a girl seeing as it had “LOSER” printed on it in some average block font and was almost see-through - in fact, Valk could see through, though not by much - and a pare of ripped jean shorts that had been covered in engine coolant and grease and countless other things and laundered too many times barely covering anything up, barefoot and obviously just as exhausted as Valk.

Valk had changed his clothes himself, just into a brand name tee with a print of some ancient Earth city a pair of sweatpants, barefoot himself. He took a sip of the tea and closed his eyes, revelling in the pure taste and soft scent. He yawned into his fist and gazed over at Paniet. He clutched his cup in both hands and let it sit in his lap, eyes trained upward toward the stars and beautiful galaxy they called home. Another breeze brushed by, flitting through Paniet’s wispy hair and catching under his shirt so that it blew up around him.

“So. What brings you up here?”

“I dunno. It took me a while to find you, so I gave up and came up here. And then I found you.”

“You were looking for me?”

“Yes, dear. I was looking for you.”

“On a totally different topic, why are you wearing that? No offense, but-”

“It looks like something a girl would wear? Yes, dear, I know.”

“So, why?”

“Because my parents happen to be here on business and they hate how I dress, so I went all out just for them.” Paniet smiled lightly, sipping his tea before turning his gaze over to Valk. He seemed to shuffle a bit closer, possibly for warmth. “You seem tired, love.”

“Whatever gave it away?” Valk deadpanned, then smiled when Paniet rolled his eyes.

“Well, for starters, you look like you’re in your pyjamas.”

“Which I am, actually. A lot better than a suit, if I do say so myself.”

“And you seem to be falling asleep as we speak.”

“Speaking of which,” Valk said, “speaking of speaking,” he grinned, “why were you looking for me?”

“I just wanted to talk. We haven’t really been able to catch up since before we even entered the wormhole back in the Choir’s bubble.” Valk nodded, turning his eyes back out to the sky.

“I suppose we haven’t,” Valk murmured. “So, what’s happened in your life that I haven’t seen or heard about through the grapevine?”

Paniet chuckled a bit, fingers curling around his mug. “Well, I saw my parents today for the first time in a long while.”

“Anything interesting happen?”

“Well, somebody mentioned my Aunt Alisa and I almost punched them.”

“I-I-” Valk spluttered. He figured Paniet was a peaceful little creature, rather than some mass murderer like he was. He had a blue star, after all. “Care to elaborate?”

“I didn’t actually hit him. But I wanted to.” Paniet shook his head and peered down at his tea. “She was the only person that didn’t despise my guts. You know, growing up in a place when cishets are the only social norm and I don’t really mix. Reminding me that she was quite literally murdered kind of hurts.”

“I’m sorry…”

Paniet shook his head, then cleared his throat, sniffling quietly. Valk whirled to see Paniet hunched over, defeated.

“Don’t be. She was a good person.”

Valk nodded. Paniet seemed to have taken a turn, which was a perfect opportunity for Valk to put Zhang’s words into action. He couldn’t seem to bring himself to say anything though. He shifted closer instead, wrapping an arm around Paniet’s shoulders and allowing him to rest his head on Valk’s shoulder. He rubbed gentle circles into Paniet’s skin with his thumb. His arms were cold.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Valk whispered.

“I am, too, love.”

__Do it. Valk, you are not getting any younger. Now is a great opportunity to do it. Do something. Anything._ _

Valk couldn’t think of anything to say, but Paniet didn’t seem to want to speak much now, anyway. As if the stars seemed to align, he and Paniet both lifted their cups together to take a sip. Valk sat his cup between his thighs and pointed up toward the sky, catching Paniet’s attention.

“You see those stars out there?” Valk traced a line over them with his finger. “They form angel wings. You see it?”

Paniet squinted and leaned forward a bit, and then his face lit up. He cuddled into Valk’s shoulder and sighed contentedly, wrapping his own arm around Valk’s waist. He smiled up at the giant, then finished off his tea and placed the mug a bit away from him.

“Hey, Paniet? Ah, Hassan.” Using his last name, despite being squaddies and using those for each other, seemed wrong.

“Yes, love?”

“There’s something I want to say. I guess, I just, I’m not-”

“A cishet? Pardon my language. I knew that already.”

“You… what?”

“I knew that already. I figured cis, but the het is, you know…” Paniet smiled a bit wider. “What are you then?”

“I-I’m,” Valk choked on his words, then took a breath and tried again. “I’m gay.”

“Good. You’re out.” Valk took a long swig from his cup, then realised the tea was gone. He gave the cup a sad look as he set it aside.

“I don’t know how to react to that?”

“Well, give me history, of course,” Paniet offered, a small, devilish smirk playing on his lips. “No details are to be left out.”

“There’s not really much to say. I don’t get attached to people.” Valk shook his head. “Well, there was one.”

“Go on.”

“I met him back when I was a part of the Establishment. Before my accident. He was killed before that. I saw him during training, but I met him like this. I sneaked out one night and he found me on the roof. We met up there a few more times, I got to know him. Then I ended up telling him that I would take him out when we won the war and everything was happily ever after. He was killed just a few weeks in. I promised myself that I wouldn’t let that happen again. Any of it. No more wars. No more people. I just wanted to work and ignore everything.” Valk nudged Paniet’s side. “That’s when Lanoe showed up and dragged my ass out into the void again. Everyone else showed up. Even you showed up, all full of yourself and calling everyone ‘love’.”

Paniet sighed out a laugh at that. “What was his name?”

“Ky Prose. Earned the nickname ‘Poet’ pretty early on, but I always called him Ky.”

Paniet nodded, then asked, “Did you ever do anything, other than just talking?”

“Not really. Pretty much did this the last couple times we met, and I kissed him once before we were deployed. That was one of the last times I saw him before he died. It was uneventful, to say the least. And then I died.” Valk laughed a bit, holding out a synthetic hand to study. “So what about you? Anything interesting in your past?”

“Pfft,” Paniet snorted, “no. My parents would quite literally pull me out of school if I came home with a boyfriend. They grounded me enough with the clothing I wore and the things I did. I guess I got mixed up in some misunderstanding with drugs once, but that lasted less than a month. I never did anything like that, don’t worry, love. I wasn’t exposed to other people like me until I left for school. I didn’t really do much in school, either. I didn’t know how, I suppose. I pretty much just locked myself up in my dorm and studied my time away. I was boring. Adlivinian.”

“You’re not now,” Valk said. This made Paniet chuckle a bit, curling deeper into his side.

“To some standards,” Paniet sighed, settling down again. He didn’t say anything else.

Valk pumped himself up again. Just do it, he kept telling himself. He couldn’t move.

Paniet turned up to look at Valk’s face, still silent. And that, Valk knew, was the moment Zhang was talking about. He cupped Paniet’s cheek with a hand, then leaned down and connected their lips for a few brief moments. Valk felt like he was going to melt. As soon as it started was he pulling away, not without Paniet’s big eyes blinking up at him innocently, obviously elated.

And then, with flushed faces, Paniet’s accentuating the scar he never got around to healing, did Paniet take Valk’s hand in his own and gathered the mugs, then led them back down the ladder and through the building and finally out onto the ground, where they followed along the path, still hand-in-hand, that lead into the city. Valk hummed quietly to himself as they walked, Paniet huddling in close when he got cold, swinging their hands.

They arrived in the array of lights and smells and sounds of the busy night city and Valk drew up a map, displaying the hologram over his wrist until he found their hotel and started that way. And then, two drinks and a bag of some fluffy candy Valk loved later, they were there, checking in and stumbling up the stairs and finally deciding to find the elevator. Valk hit the button for his floor before Paniet could say anything.

They arrived at his room a minute later, and Valk struggled the door open and collapsed onto the bed while Paniet huffed out an, “Oh, get up” and slipped under the blanket, only then stopping to relish the view they had right out the window at their feet. Paniet had no intention of returning to his room.

“You can see the angel wings from here.”

“Go to sleep, love.”

That Valk did not do. Instead, he rolled over so he could tug his shirt off, then pulled the comforter up to his hip and cuddled up next to the tiny engineer next to him, encasing him in a soft embrace that Paniet begrudgingly returned. He yawned into Valk’s shoulder and accepted the kiss pressed to his forehead, then pressed his own into the crook of Valk’s neck. He exhaled slowly, eyes fluttering shut, timing his breaths to match Valk’s. It was quiet that night.

Everyone was.

* * *

 


End file.
